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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28013379">Zombies</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithlessone/pseuds/faithlessone'>faithlessone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Stormheart - (M!Trevelyan/Cassandra) [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, fluff and then not-so-fluff, just FYI, the fallow mire, writing this fic made me love sera even more</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 21:00:46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,537</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28013379</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithlessone/pseuds/faithlessone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sera, Dorian, Cassandra and Brennan attempt to lighten the mood in the Fallow Mire with a little contest...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cassandra Pentaghast/Male Trevelyan, Male Inquisitor/Cassandra Pentaghast</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Stormheart - (M!Trevelyan/Cassandra) [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1756030</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Zombies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He hates the Fallow Mire.</p><p>Though, if there is one thing that he takes comfort in, it is that Dorian is somehow having a worse time than he is.</p><p>“Have I mentioned recently,” Dorian says, for at least the eighth time since they had arrived in this walking-corpse-infested swamp, “that you take me to all the loveliest places?”</p><p>“And have I mentioned recently,” Brennan replies, a little tetchy, “that it wasn’t <em>my</em> idea to go to a nightmare future?”</p><p>Dorian grimaces. “Well… so <em>nice</em> of you to invite me to this one.”</p><p>“He only did it because Elfy pretended to be asleep, and he’s scared of Vivvy,” Sera chimes in, climbing over a short wall and splashing at the edge of the water.</p><p>“<em>Sera</em>!” he yells, though whether he’s more grumpy about her (entirely accurate) read of his party selection process, or the fact that (yet again) she is actively trying to attract more shambling corpses to their location, he isn’t sure.</p><p>“Target practice!” she calls out, joyful, as she fires a volley of arrows at the latest swarm. “Come on! I’m winning by miles.”</p><p>“Winning what?” Cassandra says, wearily. He notes that, though she has her sword unsheathed, she is making no attempt toward fighting.</p><p>“The competition, duh! Who can kill the most of these… zombie things. And there’s points, too, for headshots and whatever. It’s like you lot aren’t even trying.”</p><p>“Because there is <em>no</em> competition.”</p><p>Sera frowns at her. “Of course there is. Why else have I been keeping count?” She fires off another arrow, spiking another corpse between the eyes. “That’s ten points to me!”</p><p>Dorian perks up, for reasons that Brennan can’t even begin to fathom, and shoots a fireball, incinerating one in an instant. “Twenty points,” he declares.</p><p>Sera cackles. “Now you’re getting it! Not twenty though. I’ll give you fifteen.”</p><p>“Fifteen? But mine was twice as dramatic as yours, therefore it must get twice the points.”</p><p>Cassandra takes down another one, quietly and efficiently, without any talk of points, while Sera and Dorian continue to argue. He freezes a second, coming up behind her, and smiles when she turns and shatters it with a strike of her shield.</p><p>“Shall we just go on without them and see how long it takes them to catch up?” he asks quietly, as she glowers at the two of them, now moved on to arguing about whether Dorian’s kills count for more or less because of his magic.</p><p>She makes a disgusted noise and stomps off ahead.</p><p>There is another one of those veilfire beacons just around the next bend, according to the map the scouts provided. He’s not sure whether it will distract their companions from their contest, or encourage them further, but it <em>is</em> part of the actual plan, so he chases after her.</p><p>“Come on!” he yells back, when it becomes clear that neither Sera nor Dorian has noticed them leaving. “More corpses ahead.”</p><p>They follow, a little reluctantly, still sniping a little at each other, though, luckily, only with words and not arrows or fireballs.</p><p>There are more demons than corpses this time. Two big rage ones that crowd the small raised area, and a few of the despair ones that are his personal least favourite, for the way they vanish and then jump out from beneath his feet when he’s least expecting it.</p><p>“Bits up, face down!” he hears Sera call, gleefully, as she takes down another one of the despair demons, allowing him to focus on the rage one currently trying to push him off the wooden platform and into the murky water below.</p><p>“Haha, I could do this all day!” Dorian returns, taking out a pair of demons with a well-placed fireball. “Fifty points, Sera!”</p><p>“No way was that fifty, arsebiscuit!” she yells back. “Only the corpsy things count!”</p><p>“Demons are corpsy thing adjacent!”</p><p>“Frigging aren’t!”</p><p>“Can we <em>please</em> concentrate on just <em>killing</em> the things?” Cassandra bellows, her voice cutting though the noise of the battle with ease. “You can sort out the points later.”</p><p>“Only the corpsy things count for points,” Sera repeats, foregoing her bow to simply stab one of the corpses through the eye socket with an arrow. “See! Now <em>that</em> was thirty points.”</p><p>“No! I thought we agreed that no single enemy was worth more than twenty-five?” Dorian returns, throwing a lightning cage around the last remaining rage demon and making it sizzle with a gesture of his staff.</p><p>“Do something more impressive then!”</p><p>Cassandra sighs heavily, before slicing a pair of corpses in half at the waist with one wide swing of her sword.</p><p>Sera squeals. “There we go, Cassie! Sixty points to you!”</p><p>“Sixty?” Dorian cries out, indignant.</p><p>“Sixty?” Cassandra sounds… pleased?</p><p>His entire worldview shifts.</p><p>The last demon falls to his lightning, and he quickly uses the veilfire to illuminate the glyph, sketching it down on his notebook for… someone else to study later. By the time he’s done, the others have jumped down, and are happily occupying themselves slaughtering the hapless undead.</p><p>Cassandra knocks one to the ground and decapitates it with the sharp point at the bottom of her shield, turning proudly toward Sera.</p><p>“Another thirty points, I should say,” she announces, daring anyone to argue with her.</p><p>“Certainly,” he agrees, smiling.</p><p>“Come on, Inky,” Sera interrupts. “You’re way behind!”</p><p>Grumpily, he thinks about apologising for doing the thing that they’re <em>supposed</em> to be doing, but, luckily (somehow) at that very moment, another of the corpses screams behind him, and, spinning on the spot, he fries it with a shock of lightning.</p><p>Sera scoffs. “Not bad. Not <em>good</em> either. The sky can do that. Five… no, three points. Just three.”</p><p>“<em>Three</em>?”</p><p>As if on cue, the lightning strikes a tree a little way ahead of them, and roasts a nearby wisp.</p><p>“Fine,” he concedes. “Three.”</p><p>They continue on for a little while, finding what could be a suitable camping spot, but they have barely even begun to cover the area required to get to the place that they believe the soldiers are being held. It seems foolish to stop for the night now.</p><p>They continue on.</p><p>After another little while, and a few more corpses put to a more permanent death, they come across an abandoned, half-ruined cottage. No more than a shack, really. It’s not the first they’ve passed, but they take a minute to sit down inside it and take a short rest.</p><p>“So, <em>you</em> spent a lot of time around dead people. Corpses,” Sera muses, her mouth full of bread.</p><p>Cassandra frowns suspiciously at her, replacing her waterskin on her belt. “As Nevarrans we pay respect to the departed in family crypts.”</p><p>“Pay respect. Like pose them and dress them up and such.” She uses the remains of her bread roll to mime playing with a doll.</p><p>“Not in the way you're picturing.”</p><p>“It sounds like a big, dead dollhouse. Dollhouses are creepy enough.”</p><p>Cassandra sighs. “Well, now you know.”</p><p>Dorian jumps in next, before he can think of any way to change the subject. “My family once took me to Nevarra, Cassandra.”</p><p>She scoffs. “You undoubtedly saw more of it than I ever did.”</p><p>“I was young, and all I wanted to do was visit a necropolis. I was desperate.”</p><p>“They're dark. And full of undead. And the smell of stale incense still makes me want to vomit.”</p><p>“Ah. There goes that childhood fantasy.” He seems genuinely disappointed for a moment, and then he leans forward. “So, Nevarran cities of the dead <em>are</em> actually filled with undead?”</p><p>“Of course. The Mortalitasi lure spirits to possess every corpse buried there.”</p><p>“And then what? Let them... wander around willy-nilly?”</p><p>“Only in the abandoned areas. The rest are sealed up in their tombs, I suppose.”</p><p>“Forever? I almost feel bad for them.”</p><p>“After a time, the moaning grates on the nerves. Trust me.”</p><p>Brennan frowns at her. “I… I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”</p><p>She gives him a look that <em>could</em> be a smile, if he squints a little and tilts his head. “I do not joke. My uncle was a Mortalitasi. A keeper of the dead.”</p><p>Sera grins, interested again. “Oh, so you spent <em>a lot</em> of time around dead people. Nice! No wonder you’re winning the contest.”</p><p>“I… am?”</p><p>She shrugs. “Not by much, so don’t get all high and mighty about it.”</p><p>He’s still trying to come to terms with this new information. Though he had heard about the Mortalitasi in the Circle, mostly in the context of his teachers trying to terrify them into obedience of the Maker by recounting the horrors of blood magic and possession and the like, he had always privately assumed that most of it was just… scaremongering.</p><p>Before he can work up the courage to ask her about some of the more colourful things his teachers had told them, Cassandra gets to her feet.</p><p>“Come along.”</p><p>They leave the shack, barely managing to make it back to the road before a trio of undead archers block their path.</p><p>“Yes!” Sera cries out. “Archers count double!”</p><p>“What? Why?” he asks, freezing one of them with a bolt of ice (mostly because Sera is more impressed with that than his lightning, and he wants more arbitrary, imaginary points.)</p><p>She cackles joyously. “Because arrows are the best, obviously!”</p><p>With that incentive, they make quick work of them. Cassandra again uses her shield to shatter the one he had frozen solid, and then claims the points for herself.</p><p>“No, no,” he objects. “That’s not fair! We split the points, surely.”</p><p>“I killed it,” Cassandra states, a hint of mirth in her voice that both delights and exasperates him.</p><p>“Only because I had <em>frozen</em> it!”</p><p>“Ten points to Inky, twenty to Andraste’s Hairy Eyeball,” Sera mediates.</p><p>“That’s not,” they both begin, him ending “fair” and her, “my name”.</p><p>Sera cackles again. “Is. Now come on. I want to see what’s down this way. Looks like fun.”</p><p>She darts off, away from the main path, toward a series of large stone arches heading toward a larger stone structure. While Cassandra goes back to scowling, he checks the map. The scouts had only marked in the basic route toward the Avaar stronghold, no detours, but there were a couple of arrows pointing toward sites of interest. If he squints, one of them does sort of point in the direction Sera has gone.</p><p>He looks up to let the other two know his findings, and finds them… already gone.</p><p>“Hey! Wait for me!” he yells after them, running to catch up.</p><p>By the time he reaches them, they are already at the first of the stone arches, a cold campfire with an abandoned stew pot next to it. Dorian is poking at the remains of the fire with the end of his staff.</p><p>“Not one of ours,” Cassandra says.</p><p>He frowns. “How can you tell?”</p><p>She gives him a sideways glare. “Our scouts are not stupid enough to build a campfire in such an exposed location.”</p><p>(This doesn’t actually track with his experience of the Inquisition’s camping practices – the one in the Storm Coast that is right on the beach, not far from a duelling giant and <em>dragon</em>, springs to mind – but he takes her word for it.)</p><p>“They wouldn’t have abandoned the stew pot, either,” Dorian notes.</p><p>(Which, come to think of it, is a little more plausible.)</p><p>“Should we follow the trail and see if we can find any more clues?”</p><p>He can tell that Cassandra doesn’t want to, that she wants to continue on the map’s marked route toward the Avaar stronghold, but she doesn’t contradict him. Instead, she nods – a short, sharp motion – and then trails after Sera, who again, has already wandered off.</p><p>After the first stone arch, the path splits. The left leads to a further avenue of the stone arches, the right to a circle of them. Sera has already gone right, so they follow her, finding a still somehow burning heap of wood and two bodies.</p><p>“Some kind of… ritual?” he suggests.</p><p>Before they can go another step, three undead rise from the ground. Between them, they make quick work of dispatching them, though no word of points is made, even from Sera. Beyond the circle is another burning heap, this time with three bodies.</p><p>More undead attack.</p><p>They destroy them.</p><p>“Perhaps this is the source of the… infestation,” Cassandra notes, wiping her sword but not sheathing it yet.</p><p>“Could be,” Dorian agrees.</p><p>Sera is distinctly less impressed. “Ugh, no. Why does it always have to be <em>sad</em>? Can’t just be fun and games, kill the corpsy things. No, now it’s <em>magic</em> and <em>sad</em> and the corpsy things were people once, just people, who didn’t ask to be all dead and still attacking.”</p><p>She stomps off and this time, he chases after her almost immediately, catching up with her back at the fork in the path.</p><p>“Are you…” he starts, but then he panics, not knowing how to finish. ‘All right’ seems like a pointless thing to ask, because she clearly isn’t. He doesn’t want to insult her intelligence or compassion, two qualities he knows she has in spades, even if other people overlook them in her.</p><p>“The Veil smells like arse here,” she tells him. “Do me a favour, yeah? Next time you want some help toppling a noble prick, or saving some little people, you tell me, and I’ll come along. But if it’s all gonna be magic and demons and sadness, you leave me <em>out</em> of it.”</p><p>He nods, solemnly. “Understood. You’ll stay though?”</p><p>“What, here?”</p><p>He nods again.</p><p>She takes a moment, then shakes herself. “Done thinking about it. Done. Let’s just get this thing over, yeah? Save your soldiers and then let’s get out of here. Stop off on the way home at some fancy bath house so we can steal all the rich tits’ frigging underpants.”</p><p>Though he can’t imagine Cassandra will be at all into that, he can certainly imagine that Dorian will be able to talk her into stopping off at a bath house if he thinks they are actually going to <em>bathe</em> in it. Now that he thinks about it, he wouldn’t mind a nice bath in a hot spring either. Scrub all the swamp water and corpses out of his skin. Perhaps he can persuade Sera to bathe first, and steal the underpants afterward?</p><p>So he smiles and nods again.</p><p>“Sounds like a plan.”</p><p>Looking up, he notes the other two members of their party, still standing in the stone circle, watching them. He gestures them over.</p><p>“Back to the main route,” he says, trying to put a little of Commander Cullen’s tone into his voice. He’s been practicing it in his room back in Haven, and he’s not sure he’s fully got the hang of the gravitas yet, but, though Dorian does glance up the stone avenue towards the mysterious structure for the space of a heartbeat, they all turn to go back to the main road.</p><p>All the levity that they had managed to work up with the contest has dissipated as they trudge on towards the next beacon.</p><p>He <em>hates</em> the Fallow Mire.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>(Decided to challenge myself to do a fic set in / heavily featuring every major area in the game, and get to a complete A-Z of titles!)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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